Best-Selling Author Tom Clancy Dead at 66

Clancy was nearly a genre unto himself, with his creations spreading beyond the page and into films like 'The Hunt for Red October' and 'The Sum of All Fears,' and video games like the 'Splinter Cell,' 'Rainbow Six' and 'Ghost Recon' series, all of which bore his name as a major selling point.

His book 'Clear and Present Danger' (1989), the fourth featuring his most popular character, Jack Ryan, became the top-selling novel of the 1980s. He continued his run of success in the 1990s, becoming one of just three authors to have hit the two-million-copies-sold mark on a first printing. (The other two were J.K. Rowling and John Grisham.)